VideoLightBox

Embedding videos into a webpage is a complicated task even if you're a very experienced developer with years of practice, not to mention beginners.

That's because this task requires taking care of a lot of aspects, like having to resize the videos to properly fit the area of the webpage where you want to place them, having to make sure the videos are actually playable and come with at least some basic playback controls, having to provide proper thumbnails for the embedded videos, and many other more. Happily, there's this small and handy tool that takes care of all these tasks for you: VideoLightBox. VideoLightBox helps you embed videos into webpages in an easy and effective manner.

VideoLightBox comes with a straightforward and intuitive interface and uses a simple 4-step approach to adding videos to a webpage. First, you add the video, either from a local file or from an externally located URL, secondly, you choose the proper thumbnails, then check some basic video customization options (templates are available), and finally you select the publishing options. You can publish the embedded video in a local folder or to a remote server using FTP. As for the source videos, this tool lets you use videos from common external sources like YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc. Last but not least, the thumbnails can be customized in numerous ways, including the use of various graphic effects.

To cut a long story short, VideoLightBox is a great tool for anyone looking for an easy and quick way to embed videos into their webpages. It's also XHTML compliant, it supports many video file formats (FLV, MP4, 3GP, etc.), it offers automatic thumbnail generation, and, best of all, it can be used for free for non-commercial purposes.